At Obiri Rock

At Obiri Rock a woman,

chalked on dark stone, floated 

next to the orb of the moon.

Drawn hundreds of years ago,

her delicate lines have lasted.

Around Obiri, the sheltering scrub

was sparse, the grasses 

dotting bare earth. I wanted to be

an Aboriginal child long ago

running that ground.

Note: Obiri Rock is in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory. The drawings are in a shallow (but tall) cave created by an overhang. I have never seen a photograph of the particular images in the poem, though photos of the many other drawings there exist and can be found by Googling. The ones in the poem were apart, very high up, and not so sharp or detailed as others.

Submitted for dVerse Form For All: Poetry as Semaphore, in which Samuel Peralta (@Semaphore on twitter) invites us to create poems with verses of exactly 140 characters. I found that this discipline 'fixed' an old draft that wasn't quite working before.

My own twitter name is @SnakyPoet. I tend to use it (poetically) for short poems, where the whole poem is 140 characters or fewer, or else to link to longer poems on my blog.